Lost Video Island

[alyssap22]

Does anyone have any overlay advice? Every time I try to do one it comes out really dark

[Aislynn]

What program are you using? If you should happen to have Sony Vegas Movie Studio, for example, and you're trying to follow a tutorial that calls for track compositing, the only option you have is multiply, which does make things so dark they're practically unusable unless you just get very lucky with really bright scenes.

If you're just basically putting one track over-top the other and fiddling around with the opacity of the top track, I've found that often certain clips just don't overlay well, they're either too dark or too busy and everything just turns into a weird mass of stuff that's just hard to tell what's going on.

Anyway, if you can give a little more detail about the procedure you're trying to use and what the results you're trying to achieve, hopefully we'll be able to help with some pointers.

[alyssap22]

I have Movie studio and have been using the multiply effect

[Brooke]

I do too. And it does get dark.

[Aislynn]

Yeah, it'll be really dark on multiply, unfortunately. This is what I do:

1. For just regular "one picture over another picture" type of overlay, then I don't use track compositing at all and just turn down the opacity of the top clip until I get the mix of seeing both clips the way that I want.

2. For something like a texture, the trick is in finding a texture that will let you brighten up the clips underneath it enough that you can see through it. I've found that a splotchy sort of texture (with a big mix of dark and light) doesn't work very well and that you're better off with a texture that's almost all one color and has a minimum amount of graininess to it. Otherwise, if you have a lot of dark colors or dark places in the texture, you're never going to be able to see the clips underneath through it. Then it's just a matter of turning the brightness up very high on each clip and adjusting it until you can hopefully see the action through the texture.

It's much trickier with Movie Studio than with the full version of Vegas unfortunately but there are still ways to try to approximate the same sort of overlay effects with a bit of fiddling around with the controls.